Hi - this is Srinivasan Sampathkumar from Triplicane. I have a passion for Marine Insurance, Cricket and of course Temples especially Thiruvallikkeni.
From Sept 2009, I am posting my thoughts in this blog ; From July 2010, my postings on Temples & Tamil are on my other blog titled "Kairavini Karayinile " (www.tamil.sampspeak.in)
Request you to keep providing your feedback which will help me improve and present better.

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

This man was born on 8th January 1942 (300 years after the
death of Galileo) in Oxford, England. His parents' house was in north
London, but during the second world war, Oxford was considered a safer
place to have babies. He wanted to study Mathematics, although his
father would have preferred medicine. Mathematics was not available at
University College, so he pursued Physics instead. After three years and
not very much work, he was awarded a first class honours degree in
Natural Science. He has twelve honorary degrees; was awarded the
CBE in 1982, and was made a Companion of Honour in 1989. He is the
recipient of many awards, medals and prizes, is a Fellow of The Royal Society
and a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences.

A black hole is a place in
space where gravity pulls so much that even light cannot get out. The gravity
is so strong because matter has been squeezed into a tiny space. This can
happen when a star is dying. Because no light can get out, people can't see
black holes. They are invisible. Space telescopes with special tools can help
find black holes. Black holes can be big or small. Scientists think the
smallest black holes are as small as just one atom.

The man
described is Stephen Hawking who is giving advice to depression sufferers: 'If
you feel like you are in a black hole, don't give up - there is a way out'. The famed Scientist made his comments at the
Royal Institution in London on the eve of his 74th birthday. Professor Stephen Hawking alluded to
depression in a lecture when he told his audience it is possible to escape from
a black hole of despair. Speaking at the Reith lecture in London, Professor
Hawking said: Black holes ain't as black as they are painted. They are not the
eternal prisons they were once thought. 'Things can get out of a black
hole...so if you feel you are in a black hole, don't give up - there's a way
out'. 'Things can get out of a black hole
both on the outside and possibly to another universe. So if you feel you are in
a black hole, don't give up - there's a way out.'

Speaking to a group of
scientists at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in August,
Professor Hawking talked about finding a solution to one of science’s most
difficult questions. What happens to the information about the physical state
of things that are swallowed up by black holes. and is it retrievable? The laws of quantum mechanics demand that it
should be, but that presents a paradox for our current understanding of black
holes, known as the 'information paradox.' ‘This has been an outstanding
problem in theoretical physics for the last 40 years...no satisfactory
resolution has been advanced,’ he said.

‘I propose that the
information is stored not in the interior of the black hole as one might
expect, but on its boundary - the event horizon,’ he said. In fact, his theory
suggests that information lost in black holes could be stored in alternative
universes. His daughter Lucy, 46, told the audience that her father's
stubbornness and laughter have kept him alive.
'He has a very enviable wish to keep going and the ability to summon all
his reserves, all his energy, all his mental focus and press them all into that
goal of keeping going. 'But not just to keep going for the purposes of survival
but to transcend this by producing extraordinary work - writing books, giving
lectures, inspiring other people with neurodegenerative and other
disabilities.'

Answering a question from
the audience, Professor Hawking said he had learnt to appreciate what he had. 'Although
it was unfortunate to get motor neurone disease, I have been very fortunate in
almost everything else. 'I have been lucky to work in theoretical physics at a
fascinating time and it' s one of the few areas in which my disability was not
a serious handicap. 'It's also important not to
become angry, no matter how difficult life may seem because you can lose all
hope if you can't laugh at yourself and life in general.'

Professor Hawking also
discussed this theory that black holes aren't 'eternal prisons', first proposed
in August. He said it may be possible to fall into a black hole and come out in
another universe. 'The hole would need to be large and if it was rotating it
might have a passage to another universe' the physicist said. The talk was initially scheduled for November
but had to be cancelled because Professor Hawking was unwell. The lectures will
be broadcast in two instalments on BBC Radio on 26 January and 2 February – reports
Mailonline.

Last August last year,
Stephen Hawking tantalised the world by saying he'd worked out a solution to
the “black hole paradox”. The black hole
paradox wouldn't have arisen if not for his own work, in a now 40-year-old
paper that proposed “Hawking radiation”. Hawking radiation is a special case:
if a virtual particle comes into existence on one side of the event horizon,
and its twin on the other side, one will fall inwards and the other one escape.
The escaping particle steals a tiny bit of the black hole's mass with it; if you
waited a sufficiently ridiculous number of billions of years, the black hole
itself would boil away into space. But the information dropping in is
destroyed. Physics writes, for example, that the “soft hair” theory focuses on
one specific kind of information – information that describes charge particles.
To generalise from this paper, in other words, we need a theory that can
describe other kinds of information.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a specific disorder that involves
the death of neurons. The man spoken about in para 1 above, suffers from a rare
early-onset slow-progressing form of ALS that has gradually paralysed him
over the decades. In his early days,
speech became slightly slurred;
the diagnosis of motor neurone disease came when Hawking was 21, in 1963; at
that time, doctors gave him a life expectancy of two years. In the
late 1960s, his physical abilities declined: he began to use
crutches and ceased lecturing regularly. As he slowly lost the ability to
write, he developed compensatory visual methods, including seeing equations in
terms of geometry. Immobilised and organs not functioning, he uses programmes,
using a switch he selects phrases, words or letters from a bank of about
2500–3000 that are scanned; lectures were prepared in advance and were sent to
the speech synthesiser in short sections to be delivered. Even that could not
last, as in 2005 he lost the use of his hand and began to control his
communication device with movements of his cheek muscles, with a rate of
about one word per minute. One cannot read any further of the sufferings. .. … ….and
this man has the strength to teach people about not falling into depression !